David Miliband, the Private Pike of Politics, has fled the country.
The BBC, unlike with cuddly Boris Johnson whom they find ‘a nasty piece of work’, can’t find a nasty word to say about him other than he didn’t quite have it within himself to wield the axe on Gordon Brown’s Prime Ministerial career.
Peter Oborne in the Telegraph thinks he can help the BBC out in digging some dirt:
David Miliband a colossus? He’s a greedy failure in a cosmic sulk
The political breed the Labour MP represents has done extraordinary harm to the nation’s governance
Perhaps I could offer a few reminders of what any BBC interviewer could ask Milibland about:
On the R4’s ‘Great Lives’ Miliband said terrorism could be both justifiable and effective:
Asked by presenter Matthew Parris whether there were any circumstances in which terrorism was justified, Mr Miliband said: ‘Yes, there are circumstances in which it is justifiable, and yes, there are circumstances in which it is effective.’
How about a Labour champion of the poor wangling a low tax rate for himself?:
How David Miliband Ltd pays less tax
By Andrew Pierce
Quietly, he has set up a company called ‘The Office of David Miliband Limited’, which will be a tax-efficient vehicle for his non-parliamentary earnings.
It will be subject to corporation tax of 20 per cent (rather than the 40 per cent rate Miliband would have to pay on his income as an individual taxpayer).
Miliband is clearly a canny operator when it comes to tax. In the past, he exploited a Revenue loophole to reduce the family’s total death duty bill by using a so-called ‘deed of variation’ in respect of his childhood home.
Already, the money has started rolling into Miliband Inc. As non-executive vice-chairman Sunderland Football Club, he gets £75,000 a year and there was a £25,000 fee for a lecture at the Emirates Centre For Strategic Studies in Abu Dhabi
Or how about buying votes for Labour with government money?:
WikiLeaks: David Miliband ‘championed aid to Sri Lanka to win votes of Tamils in UK’
David Miliband championed aid to Sri Lanka during last year’s humanitarian crisis to win the support of expatriate Tamils living in key Labour marginal seats, one of his own Foreign Office staff claimed.
David Miliband championed aid to Sri Lanka to win the votes of expatriate Tamils in key marginal seats, a Foreign Office worker claimed Photo: PA
By Gordon Rayner, Chief Reporter 6:45AM GMT 02 Dec 2010
Tim Waite, a Foreign Office team leader on Sri Lanka, was quoted in a leaked US Embassy cable explaining why the then foreign secretary was lavishing so much attention on the island’s plight.
“Waite said that much of (the government) and ministerial attention to Sri Lanka is due to the ‘very vocal’ Tamil diaspora in the UK, numbering over 300,000, who have been protesting in front of parliament since 6 April,” wrote Richard Mills, a political officer at the US Embassy in London.
“He said that with UK elections on the horizon and many Tamils living in Labour constituencies with slim majorities, the government is paying particular attention to Sri Lanka, with Miliband recently remarking to Waite that he was spending 60 per cent of his time at the moment on Sri Lanka.”
Or how about his judgement on Gordon Brown….was Miliband lying or deluded at a time when polls showed 1 in 5 voters thought Brown was a terrible PM?:
The foreign secretary, David Miliband, yesterday defended Brown as a man who commanded “the detail as well as the bigger picture. I don’t recognise the portrait John Prescott has set out”.
It seems that even as Foreign Secretary Miliband lacked genuine experience and judgement, as noted by Oborne above, and the Guardian as it continued:
More experienced colleagues recognised it all too well. “These memoirs are unhelpful, but there is nothing in them which people do not already know,” said another senior minister.
Or how about this as noted by ‘Mat’ in the comments here:
The Foreign Office’s appeasement of Tehran has some strong precedents, says Christopher Booker
Last week, I reported on the strange eagerness of our Foreign and Commonwealth Office to appease the murderous regime in Tehran. Another example of the FCO’s willingness to kowtow to nasty regimes has been flagged up in another newspaper, where a columnist researching ahead of a recent visit to China came across a remarkable statement from the Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, slipped out on the FCO website on October 29 2008, just before representatives of the Dalai Lama were due to hold talks in Beijing on the future of Tibet.
Buried in the statement was Britain’s recognition for the first time that, like “all other members of the EU… we regard Tibet as part of the People’s Republic of China”. The historic significance of this change was not lost on Beijing, since until then Britain, with its unique role in Tibet’s history, had for 100 years been very careful not to recognise Chinese sovereignty over Tibet. The group known as Free Tibet noted that Miliband’s concession gravely weakened the position of the Tibetan envoys without getting anything in return – commenting how extraordinary it was that Britain should have “rewarded China in such a way in the very year that China has committed its worst human rights abuses in Tibet in decades, including killing and torture”.
All good material to flesh out an interview with such a prominent, in the BBC’s mind, political figure….some very serious questions needing to be asked of a superannuated Labour politician…buying votes and selling out Tibet…..but then digging the dirt on 13 years of Labour destruction isn’t on the BBC’s ‘to do’ list.
Never mind…perhaps when he returns. You can’t keep a good man down.
